Your busiest seller may need a better process

When pipeline is light, the response is often predictable: more calls, more emails, more meetings. I understand why. Activity is visible and easy to put on a dashboard. But before asking for more, I'd want to know where people are supposed to find the time.

Some of your most conscientious sellers are the ones doing every bit of admin properly. They complete the fields, prepare the proposals, chase the internal answers and update everything before the forecast call. If that leaves them less time with buyers, calling it an effort problem is a pretty poor diagnosis.

If the process is doing the selling team's job for it, badly, no target will fix that.

The friction is rarely one enormous task. It's five minutes looking for a price list, another ten rebuilding a deck, a CRM field that needs updating twice and a case study nobody can locate. Each interruption looks harmless. Across a team, it adds up.

That's why I'd rather watch the work than guess at it. Ask a few sellers to show you how they prepare, follow up and record a typical customer interaction. Time the steps. You'll soon find out which ones are necessary and which ones exist because nobody has challenged them.

Use the diagnostic as a conversation starter, not a scientific benchmark. The score isn't drawn from a representative dataset of sales teams. It's simply a way to expose friction that deserves a closer look.

1. 1Sellers research accounts and contacts by hand before most calls.0 · 1 · 2
2. 2Call notes are written up after the call, from memory, sometimes hours later.0 · 1 · 2
3. 3People regularly ask in chat where the latest deck, price sheet or case material is.0 · 1 · 2
4. 4CRM updates happen in a rush before forecast or pipeline meetings.0 · 1 · 2
5. 5Proposals and follow-up emails are rebuilt from scratch or from old versions each time.0 · 1 · 2
6. 6Each seller uses AI differently, or not at all, with no shared approach.0 · 1 · 2
7. 7Managers spend more time chasing data than coaching conversations.0 · 1 · 2
8. 8New starters learn the process by shadowing whoever happens to have time.0 · 1 · 2
9. 9You pay for tools that only a few people open each week.0 · 1 · 2
10. 10Sellers say they are busy but struggle to point to time spent with buyers.0 · 1 · 2

If several people score the same problem highly, investigate it. Don't immediately buy software. Work out whether the issue is unclear ownership, poor information, a duplicated process or a tool that hasn't been configured properly.

• 0 to 5: your process is mostly helping. The bigger opportunity is likely to be skills and the quality of customer conversations, so look there next.
• 6 to 12: friction is taking real selling time. One or two well-chosen workflow changes, such as meeting preparation or call notes, will be felt by the team quickly.
• 13 to 20: the process is doing too much of the work around the sale. Fix this before you raise targets or add headcount, or you will be hiring people into the same problem.

Then choose one improvement you can measure. Capture the time and quality before the change, test it with a small group and see whether it genuinely makes the work easier.

And ask what people do with the time returned. If it creates room for more useful customer conversations or better coaching, brilliant. If it simply disappears into another internal task, you've solved one problem and uncovered another.

And if you are about to hire, run this exercise first. Understanding the process makes the next role clearer: what the new person will actually spend their time on, which skills they need and what they can learn from the team you already have. You may still need the hire. You will just make it with your eyes open.